Category: Articles

“I’m not going to temper my opinions.” – Shaler’s Mom

No, that’s not an actual quote from my mother — I’ll explain how it involves her in a second.

It’s something Tyler Hurst said to me in an email in May of this year. He offered to buy me a beer, and I had declined. Unfortunately, I also tried to give him advice. It was not taken well. “Thanks for the life lesson,” he blurted back to me.

Tyler first contacted me in April 2008, about a month after he joined Twitter. I occasionally received instant messages from a stranger, going by the screen name “tdhurst,” ranging from chatting about something I had recently tweeted to requesting job leads to asking for career advice. It was civil. I engaged with this random Internet person and gave my opinion on whatever I was asked. I thought nothing of it, because it happens every once in a while.

Some time later, a Twitter user, @tdhurst, started popping up on my radar in the #phx Twitter “echo chamber.” I hadn’t paid much attention to the screen name of the instant messenger tdhurst, so I failed to make the connection until later.

The statement, “being on the safe side of the monitor brings out the jerk in some people,” was especially true about Tyler’s public persona on Twitter — immature, crass, and very confrontational. Quickly, his reputation began to precede him. I would hear his name come up at social gatherings, and it was usually paired with derogatory terms. I say precede him because I — and some of the people I heard talking about him — had never met him (in person).

Why did I decline to have beer with him over a year after our first contact? Mostly because of his attitude. I don’t want to get involved with people like him. I’d rather not exist to people like him (Twitter’s block feature is great for this — out of sight, out of mind). I also declined because I don’t drink beer. People who know me, even a just little bit, know I don’t drink. Aside from sips of my parents’ beer, champagne, piña colada, etc. as a kid, I’ve never consumed alcohol. None. Obviously, Tyler didn’t know much about me. But as it would turn out, Tyler had already formed some opinions about me (and my mother).

In August of 2008, I was at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas and checked to see if any of my friends at the conference had heard that I was there and tried to contact me via Twitter. What I saw instead is this:

@antibrianshaler was a Twitter user who pretended to be me while mocking and making fun of me for over a year in a first-person perspective. Minutes after Tyler’s tweet, there was a new anti-me account: @shalersmom.

The tweets were disturbing, to say the least. Here are some examples:
“I hope @brianshaler spoons me tonight.”
“@brianshaler was breastfed until he was 15…he still give me a hungry look from time to time”
“I liked it when @brianshaler and @antibrianshaler suckled me.”
“i just masturbated with a pez dispenser. an @brianshaler pez dispenser, that is.”
“Whenever I see a mention of @brianshaler online (which is a LOT), I close my eyes and touch my nipples, longing for him to feed from them.”
“My ovaries ache.”
“@antibrianshaler why won’t you come suckle my nipples?”

This happened off and on for about a month. Then Tyler contacted me and confessed to being the person who created and ran the @shalersmom Twitter account.

When I told Tyler I did not want to sit down with him and have a beer, I told him why. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but by this time, I had pieced together the Twitter @tdhurst and the instant messenger tdhurst, who had asked me for advice in the past. I told him that unless his behavior and reputation changed, I had no interest in associating with him. Apparently, he was no longer interested in receiving any kind of advice from me, because he shot me back an email (emphasis mine): “So you’re basically saying that you’re too good to associate with me. Okay. I’ll support the people that deserve it. I’m not going to temper my opinions because I’m worried about someone’s feelings being hurt. Thanks for the life lesson.”

Yeah. It’s his opinion that my mother “masturbated with an @brianshaler pez dispenser.”

I was inspired to write this post after seeing Tyler mention on his blog that he developed a panel at a conference to solve the “lack of camaraderie” in Phoenix. You can probably imagine how him saying that did not sit right with me.

Life is short, so you want to get a lot of bang for your buck. Whether you want to help people in poverty, find a cure for cancer, bring new technology into the world, build a business that effects the lives of many people, or make any other mark on society, the scalability is one of the most important ways to make the biggest impact possible within a finite lifespan.

Even if you could live forever, it would take a vast amount of resources to do everything directly and personally.

You can use scalability to increase the speed and reach of your impact. You can also use it to reduce the cost.

In terms of world hunger, the direct and unscalable approach would be to feed everyone individually using your own food and money. The ultimate scalable approach would be to come up with an innovative method to feed people that is free to distribute, such as a technology or technique that only requires word-of-mouth to spread.

I was thinking about this when I read an article recently about Bill Gates, entitled Can the world’s richest man feed the planet? Even if he had enough money to buy everyone on the planet a meal, is that the most optimal way for him to feed them? Of course not. He would exhaust his capital in one fell swoop and in a matter of days, people would be starving again. Instead, he said this: “Three-quarters of the world’s poorest people get their food and income by farming small plots of land. So if we can make smallholder farming more productive and more profitable, we can have a massive impact on hunger and nutrition and poverty.”

It’s like the adage, “Give a man a fish feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime.” In this case, Gates could either give people food to feed them for a day, or he can find innovative ways to help people feed themselves for a lifetime.

I like to extract principles from things so I can apply the same ideology to other aspects of my life and my work. In software development, creating platforms does just this. You create the foundation that allows other people to build upon it. Cumulatively, you’ll have the potential for great things that would simply be beyond anything you could come up with if you typed code into a keyboard for the rest of your life. Creating an innovative new IDE or a language can accomplish the same thing, but in a different way.

In the last few decades, the power of peer-to-peer and/or crowdsourcing technology has brought the world some amazing things, such as the Internet and Wikipedia. You don’t have to type out the greatest encyclopedia of all time, because you can instead create a simple mechanism for the world to contribute to one.